us
pioneer, as a reckless frontier fighter, and as a soldier of great
promise. He learned many things in this time, and was taught much in
the hard school of adversity. In the effort to conquer Frenchmen and
Indians he studied the art of war, and at the same time he learned
to bear with and to overcome the dullness and inefficiency of the
government he served. Thus he was forced to practise self-control in
order to attain his ends, and to acquire skill in the management of
men. There could have been no better training for the work he was to
do in the after years, and the future showed how deeply he profited by
it. Let us turn now, for a moment, to the softer and pleasanter side
of life, and having seen what Washington was, and what he did as a
fighting man, let us try to know him in the equally important and far
more attractive domain of private and domestic life.

CHAPTER IV

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Lewis Willis, of Fredericksburg, who was at school with Washington,
used to speak of him as an unusually studious and industrious boy, but
recalled one occasion when he distinguished himself and surprised his
schoolmates by "romping with one of the largest girls."[1] Half a
century later, when the days of romping were long over and gone, a
gentleman writing of a Mrs. Hartley, whom Washington much admired,
said that the general always liked a fine woman.[2] It is certain that
from romping he passed rapidly to more serious forms of expressing
regard, for by the time he was fourteen he had fallen deeply in love
with Mary Bland of Westmoreland, whom he calls his "Lowland Beauty,"
and to whom he wrote various copies of verses, preserved amid the
notes of surveys, in his diary for 1747-48. The old tradition
identified the "Lowland Beauty" with Miss Lucy Grymes, perhaps
correctly, and there are drafts of letters addressed to "Dear Sally,"
which suggest that the mistake in identification might have arisen
from the fact that there were several ladies who answered to that
description. In the following sentence from the draft of a letter to a
masculine sympathizer, also preserved in the tell-tale diary of 1748,
there is certainly an indication that the constancy of the lover was
not perfect. "Dear Friend Robin," he wrote: "My place of residence at
present is at his Lordship's, where I might, were my heart disengaged,
pass my time very pleasantly, as there is a very agreeable young lady
in the same house, Colonel George Fairfax'